Friday 25, July - 20h - Opéra Berlioz / Le Corum

Latvian Radio Chorus
Conductor Sigvards Klava

Latvian Radio Chorus

The 2008 edition of the Festival marks twelve years of presence, unfailing fidelity and complicity with the Latvian Radio Chorus. Founded in 1940, this vocal ensemble can tackle all repertoires—whether in its normal formation of 24 members, reduced or reinforced, it serves all types of music: contemporary, Romantic or ancient, with the same mastery, thanks to its director, Sigvards Klava. It was thus ideally suited to serving the ‘spadework’ policy practiced by the Radio France and Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon Festival.
Whether forgotten scores, works restored to favour, premieres or mainstays of the repertoire, the Latvian Radio Chorus has sung all at Montpellier since 1996, when it was still called the Riga Radio-Television Chorus. We remember the operas—Cilea’s L’Arlesiana, Schoeck’s Penthesilea, Donizetti’s Esili de Siberia and Duca d’Alba as well as Gnecchi’s Cassandra, Offenbach’s Die Rheinnixen and Mariotte’s Salomé, to mention only them—, along with Mozart’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Mass in C and Cantata on the Death of Joseph II, also sung at Montpellier.
Among the Chorus’s unforgettable performances we will note its participation in the Bacchanales and other surprises the Festival has in store. It has also been associated with Roberto Alagna in Lalo’s Fiesque and sang Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with the Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, but the Orchestre National de Montpellier remains its principal partner.
During the Festival, leading conductors have taken turns directing it, including Friedemann Layer, musical director of the Opera and Orchestra, a reputed colourist whose demands it manages to embrace. Armin Jordan, effective at controlling the massed forces, conducted them in 2005, in Humperdinck’s Die Königskinder. In addition, these marvellous artists have appeared at the Corum, the Mecca of all musical crossings, as well as in the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and the Cour Jacques-Cœur. Each year, preparation for the Festival, with two or sometimes three works to be learnt, presupposes a particular challenge and achievement that the Latvian Radio Chorus takes up with brio, for it gives more than forty concerts a year, regularly records in the studio and, in Latvia, has works written especially for it. But choral music plays a fundamental role in the development of national music in Latvia, and in recognition of its talent and activity, the Latvian Radio Chorus has twice received the country’s Music Grand Prize, in 1994 and 2000.

Gioacchino Rossini
Petite Messe solennelle

The adjective ‘little’ is quite typical of its author’s humour, for the work lasts a good hour and a half and written for very modest forces: 2 pianos and harmonium and, at the first performance, 12 singers in all. But Rossini has not finished joking, since he classified this work amongst his ‘sins of old age’, dedicated it to God Himself (‘Good God…here this poor little Mass is finished at last…’) and finally, wrote on his manuscript ‘…Lord, be assured, I affirm there will be no Judas at my lunch and that mine [the 12 singers…to relate to the 12 Apostles] will sing Thy Praises on pitch and con amore’. The original reduced forces are explained by the commission from Count Pillet–Will. This Mass was, in fact, meant for his wife and first performed in the private chapel of their Paris townhouse, in the spring of 1864.

Catherine Michaud